It wasn’t a death ring 😢

[BelovedBirds]

Lol every duck I’ve ever known has had a bit of crazy . It’s a great pic of her standing on your shoulder.

Yeah, I agree, they do look like early quitters. Those eggs were never fertilised though. We already had 5 chickens (2 roos, two hens and what is probably a cockerel) when we adopted a further 6 hens from a work friend’s MIL, she was moving and couldn’t keep them.

Being new birds I kept them quarantined for a week, all hens, no roosters. I’m currently building a new coop inside the old tennis court so I can separate my two roos into separate flocks, I only have the roof and nesting box to go before it’s finished (currently have a cage inside coop as a nesting box), so I’ve been keeping them there.

Then on the 8th day of having the new birds I let my older flock free-range in the bottom half of the tennis court because that’s what they were used to doing before the new birds came and they’d been confined to the smaller run all week and I felt bad about that.

I had two lots of bird netting up between the two groups with a big gap between, but Gladys got through it, she’s the smallest adult chicken I’ve ever seen. Well, she was cooing to my alpha roo and he was all too happy to oblige, so I let them share the middle strip together. She’s been laying fertilised eggs since then.

The older flock went back to the old run and Gladys and the rest of the new girls stayed with the new coop.

Darren never got the chance to mount Buffy or the other new girls, only Gladys, so that’s how I know Buffy isn’t laying fertilised eggs.

Wow, that was a lot longer than I meant it to be. I hope it clears things up a little though. I do agree that Buffy’s eggs look like early quitters, I really do get where you’re coming from. I know that unfertilised eggs have blood vessels so the only thing I can put it down to is that the egg was starting to go bad

Thanks! It's one of my favourite photos of her lol
unfertilised eggs shouldn't usually have blood in, it can happen sometimes, but its not the norm as far as I'm aware-
Could you get one of Buffy's fresh eggs, crack it and photo the yolk? That's an easy way to know if they're fertile, there should be a white dot in the yolk, depending on how it looks, it can tell us whether they're fertilised or not.
I've incubated lots of unfertilised eggs before while doing a shop bought egg experiment, and none had blood in unless they had begun developing, rotten incubated eggs just go kinda runny and stinky

 

[Anne-Marie S]

Actually, I have a pic already from the day after I put the eggs in the incubator. I was showing hubby the difference between fertilised and unfertilised. The bullseye egg is from Gladys, the other is from Buffy.

 

[Anne-Marie S]

Thanks! It's one of my favourite photos of her lol
unfertilised eggs shouldn't usually have blood in, it can happen sometimes, but its not the norm as far as I'm aware-
Could you get one of Buffy's fresh eggs, crack it and photo the yolk? That's an easy way to know if they're fertile, there should be a white dot in the yolk, depending on how it looks, it can tell us whether they're fertilised or not.
I've incubated lots of unfertilised eggs before while doing a shop bought egg experiment, and none had blood in unless they had begun developing, rotten incubated eggs just go kinda runny and stinky

Oh, these were both fresh, straight from the nesting box, not the bator.